"The Greatest Show on Earth" - Discussion 3 (Chapter 3)

Hello again everyone! I'm excited about this weeks reading, we are starting to see some good examples of the evolutionary process as well as some of the primary examples that helped Darwin shape his realizations. I found a few of the examples very interesting and I really enjoyed reading about the predictions that were made by two different people (Darwin & Wallace) around the same time periods, with limited knowledge of each others research. This, to me, was great to read about. Finding that multiple researchers were finding some of the same information at the same time shows me that there is a decent amount of merit to what they proposed.

When i was getting through the examples in the text there were a few things that stuck out to me and a few things I had some questions about.

1- The idea that the pollinators (Hummingbirds, Bees, etc.) had the same tendencies towards what we described as 'beautiful' flowers. Hence, causing the flowers that were more colorful and pleasing to look at to become pollinated more often and have better chances of surviving. Also falling under this same idea was the idea that the hens are more attracted to a mate that had a more flamboyant and colorful than others that looked a little more plain, again using the same presumption that they are seeing these colors the same way we see them.

2- Natural Selection. There are so many good examples of this in the book, and the way it ends up working always seems to be a cycle to me. The one i saw the cycle in the most was the Canary. The idea that the females were attracted to the males song and it caused a sort of arousal that caused the likelihood of them mating to increase. This, in turn, would help to develop more males to be born that had the more attractive song and would eventually cause more mating. This is the big concept behind Natural Selection, Right? I'm new to the details of Natural Selection and the majority of the ideas in this chapter include the female making a choice of its mate, so I wanted to clarify the process and what parameters constitute that it is indeed Natural Selection.

Okay, i don't want to take up all the main points, I hope to hear from everyone soon. Thanks again for joining me!